Meet Our Customers: IG

A short interview with Ivan Gowan, Head of IT Development at IG, the world’s first financial spread betting company.
  
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Company's core businesses are Contracts for Difference (CFDs) and Spread Betting".

 Could you let us know any further information?

"IG Group (LSE:IGG), headquartered in London, began its activity in 1974 as the world’s first financial spread betting company. In the first half of 2012, IG Group recorded GBP 366.8M (+17.3% from the previous area) in trading revenues and GBP 185.7M in profit before tax. With offices in 14 countries across five continents, we execute more than five million transaction a month for over 140,000 global clients".

Meet Our Customers: OptionMonster

A short interview with Danny Maguire, VP Program Management Office at OptionMonster, a Chicago-based financial company that provides private investors with insight, ideas, and education on the US equities and options market.
  
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"optionMONSTER® is a Chicago-based company that provides stock market insight, option trade ideas, and options education to meet the needs of do-it-yourself investors.
tradeMONSTER™, a powerful online trading platform for active stock, option and futures traders who demand professional grade online trading tools, has been launched in 2008, separated from but affiliated with optionMONSTER®.
stockMONSTER®, founded in 2006, is the third member of the family and helps self-directed investors to read news and analysis in order to invest with confidence".

Lightstreamer's customers dominated the Shares Awards 2012

We are very excited to announce that several Lightstreamer's customers in the financial industry, where our product consolidated its success and value, have been awarded for the coveted Shares Awards 2012 on November 15, 2012 at London's Grovenor House Hotel.

This prestigious UK's financial services gala reached its 11th edition this year, and it's certainly recognized as one of the most widely known and desired prizes as a clear benchmark of excellence and innovation across the industry.

Meet Our Customers: Bùssola do Investidor

A short interview with Frederico Skwara, Founder & CEO at Bùssola do Investidor, a website focused on providing tools and content to individual investors, within a social environment.
  
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Bússola do Investidor is a website focused on providing tools and content to individual investors, within a social environment. We offer real time quotes, interactive charts for technical analysis, a portfolio manager and contents related to investments, such as news and articles".

On iOS URL Connection Parallelism and Thread Pools

The problem

Did you know iOS has a limit on the number of concurrent NSURLConnections to the same end-point? No? Maybe you should, we discovered it the hard way.

Create a new single-view app project on Xcode and copy the following snippet inside the viewDidLoad event of your view controller:

The New WinRT SDK and Demo

With the introduction of Windows 8, a new application architecture, namely Windows Runtime or WinRT, was also introduced.

WinRT, which has to be used for an application to be published on the Windows Store, is not fully compatible with the old .NET framework. But don't worry, we've got you covered again: with the release of Lightstreamer 5.1 we have made available a brand new WinRT client SDK that can be used to develop Lightstreamer-enabled Windows Store apps.

Our Season's Greetings...

It seems that even Lightstreamer has been affected by the holiday season mood :) 

We would like to wish all the Lightstreamer users a happy holiday season and a prosperous 2013 year!

Thanks for supporting us.

Warm regards,
The Lightstreamer Team

Lightstreamer 5.1 Has Been Released

We are very excited to announce that a new version of Lightstreamer is now publicly available for download.

The new package, tagged Lightstreamer 5.1 Colosseo 20121220, contains updated versions of several components (such as Lightstreamer Server 5.1, Lightstreamer JavaScript Client 6.0.1, Lightstreamer iOS Client 1.2, etc.) as well as a brand new client SDK for Windows 8 WinRT.

Meet Our Customers: EFG Hermes

A short interview with Waleed Kamel, Software Development Manager at EFG Hermes, a premier investment bank in the Middle East.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"EFG Hermes is a premier investment bank in the Middle East and is recognized as the market leader in securities brokerage, asset management, investment banking, private equity, and research in this area. EFG Hermes has a huge number of customers, ranging from governments and corporations to institutional and individual investors".

Meet Our Customers: BuzzAllStars

A short interview with Rob O'Dea, founder and CEO at BuzzAllStars, an innovative social gaming platform that allows players to interact and compete during live sports events.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

Buzz All Stars is a platform for interactive social games that will revolutionize the way sports fans engage with each other through live sports, creating the ultimate social gaming experience.

Lightstreamer won a comparison at Java2Days 2012 Conference

We are happy to see that Lightstreamer resulted the winner in a presentation titled "Realtime Apps with Lightstreamer, GWT & HTML5" by Detelin Zlatev and Mariyan Nenchev from Cayetano Gaming, at the recent Java2Days 2012 Conference.

Java2Days 2012 Conference took place on October 25-26 in Sofia, Bulgaria to highlight today’s cutting edge Java trends in field of software development, technologies, and business. 

Meet Our Customers: LearnShip

A short interview with Jürgen Jatzkowski, CTO at LearnShip, a specialist in online foreign languages training.
  
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"LearnShip is a specialist in online foreign languages training. The LearnShip platform offers a state-of-the-art virtual classroom for individual or small groups lessons, integrating an advanced multimedia digital technology to provide a face-to-face educational experience simply impossible to replicate in the traditional classroom settings. Learnship offers qualified instructors teaching in their native language and more flexibility comparing to any other traditional language school, as students can join the lessons regardless of where they effectively are - just a computer and a Internet access is needed".

Meet Our Customers: DCM Capital

A short interview with Paul Laight, CTO of DCM Capital Ltd, an online CFD, Forex and spread betting platform with unique social media twitter sentiment analysis technology.
 
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"The world’s first multi-asset online trading platform with integrated social media sentiment analysis technology".

Lightstreamer Goes All In with bwin.party

We are thrilled to announce that the Lightstreamer technology has been selected by bwin.party to power its world-class gaming and betting platforms.

According to their public statements, the Group has generated pro-forma net revenues in 2011 of €816.0m and commands leading market positions in four product verticals: online sports betting, poker, casino, and bingo, with some of the world’s biggest online gaming brands including bwin, PartyPoker, PartyCasino and Foxy Bingo with proprietary gaming platforms.

How to Upgrade to Web Client Library 6 and Later

Lightstreamer JavaScript client version 6 brings some new interesting features and some long-awaited changes. This time we’ve chosen not to pass from the deprecate-first remove-then path as we’ve always done: in fact the entire API was completely designed from scratch to be more flexible and easy to use. Unfortunately, this also means that some effort is necessary to migrate your code based on Lightstreamer HTML Client 4 or 5 to the new Lightstreamer JavaScript Client 6 and later.
This guide was written to help you with the migration. Only the simplest way to do the porting is illustrated; it is obviously possible to use more complicated techniques. Also following only the guide you will not exploit many of the new capabilities of the library, so, before doing the porting I suggest you to check the changelog, the new Development Guide and the Tutorial.

Dynamic Bandwidth and Frequency Management

If you have been knowing Lightstreamer for a long time, you appreciate that it has always been particularly good at managing the bandwidth used by the stream connection and the individual update rate of each subscription.

In addition to heuristically spot network congestions and adapting the data flow automatically, Lightstreamer has always offered an API call to dynamically change the maximum bandwidth granted to a given stream session.

The good news is that now both Lightstreamer 4.1 and 5.0 allow you to change the maximum frequency granted to each individual subscription on the fly.

Meet Our Partners - Markets Pulse

A short interview with Ravit Friedberg, Product Manager of Markets Pulse, an Enterprise Binary Option technology provider for online trading companies.
 
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Markets Pulse provides financial companies with advanced binary options technology, offering a great addition to any online trading platform. The offering includes easy-to-integrate back office and technologically advanced front-end trading platforms. The technology is installed completely on-site, providing confidentiality of data and a customizable trading experience. Working with regulated companies such as FxTrade Financial and Gallant Capital Markets, the technology is also ready for regulation".

Meet Our Customers: CanDeal.Ca

A short interview with Joe D'Alessandro, CTO of CanDeal.Ca, the leading electronic marketplace for Canadian dollar debt securities.
  
Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"CanDeal provides institutional market participants with an electronic marketplace for Canadian dollar debt securities. Currently we operate in Canada, US and Europe with 200+ Institutional investors and 13 investment dealers".

Lightstreamer in a PhoneGap app

[UPDATE 2014]The original hello world application was simplified by the PhoneGap team. We adapted our own demo to be as close as possible to the original one. As a result some of the descriptions of this article are a bit outdated. Most of it is still valid though, so you can safely go on reading.[/UPDATE]

As a JavaScript guy and mostly-OS-agnostic kind of person I wait for the day when I will be able to fully exploit the power of ApplicationCache and other new JS APIs such as GeoLocation and IndexedDB, to install the same web application and have the same OS-integrated experience on my Windows notebook, my Sabayon box or on my Android Smartphone. Not to mention the pleasure of sharing the exact same app with my iOS, Windows Phone or Tizen oriented friends.

Also, as a developer, not having to develop a native application per each OS out there would be a big plus.

Lightstreamer 5.0 Colosseo is now available!

We are very thrilled to announce that the final release of Lightstreamer 5.0, codename Colosseo, is now generally available for download.

Lightstreamer 5.0 includes full support for WebSockets, a brand new JavaScript client API, impressive performance boost, and many new features.